This Changes Everything

Originally on Goodreads (November 2014):

Probably the most important book of the year. Climate change challenges anyone's pet ideology: it makes Marxists doubt their utopian materialism, forces laissez-faire capitalists to consider the peculiarities of externalities and makes anarchists wonder whether mutualist instincts are strong enough to deal with invisible, delayed forms of exploitation.

Klein argues for a planned economy, but like most contemporary socialists she subscribes to a rather anarchic, decentralized system to uphold norms like carbon emissions and tax fossil fuel burners. The details are sketchy - Klein unfortunately prefers a sophomoric discussion of Baconian thought to an in-depth look at how you can empower the State without reinforcing clientelism - but the general idea makes sense.

If anything, Klein conveys the urgency of the climate challenge. Right-wing populism has ensured that we are already too late and that environmental disasters are much worse than they could have been. If your political flavor of choice does not prevent worsening of the current situation, you might just as well throw it out of the window.

This book would be a lot more impactful if it was shorter and tighter. The facts are exhaustively listed and cited, but it just comes off as more exhausting than thorough. You're likely to learn something new, probably something horrifying, but this is unlikely to change any minds. It is also particularly frustrating to read this years after it was published, and see that so little has changed in the intervening years.

I can't see this changing anyone's mind. It presents the overwhelming facts of climate change that everyone already knows, and which any denialist has already come to terms with ignoring.

Klein is so committed to her approach of listing off facts, that in a rare paragraph where she discusses her own feelings, rather than make any effort to communicate those feelings, she simply enumerates the scenarios: "I felt some things when I saw XYZ, and I also felt some things when I saw ABC, and I also felt some things when I saw DEF..." No effort is made to explain what she feels, and definitely not to help the reader feel those things alongside the author.

Klein opens her book with a quote from Rebecca Tarbottom, who was ExecutiveDirector of the Rainforest Action Network (she died accidentally not long before this book was completed), the punchline of which is "What we're really talking about, if we're really honest with ourselves, is transforming everything about the way we live on this planet." The rest of the book argues the case.

Klein does not believe that we can overcome the problem of global heating without a radical reorganization of our attitude to the world, and of the way we live in it. This, she argues, means socialism and the overthrow of the capitalist system. Capitalism is, by its very nature, antagonistic to the living world; even when it dons a green mantle, it cannot help but undermine Life itself. Capitalists themselves know this, which is why they are developing ways of escaping the mess that they will inevitably create, while leaving the rest of us to deal with the consequences. Macron's 'premiers de cordée' (lead climbers) are using their ropes to get the hell out of here, to a sheltered and heavily guarded mountain eyrie - or Mars, if necessary - while cutting off the 'loosers' who they think of as so much excess baggage.

If this is so - and I was already convinced of this before reading Klein's book - then what is to be done? For some, it is already too late (see, e.g. eand.co/how-capitalism-torched-the-planet-and-left-it-a-smoking-fascist-greenhouse-fe687e99f070) but Klein sees a sliver of hope. This is situated in the confrontation regions that she refers to as Blockadia, the places where the 'New Climate Warriors' confront the coal miners, the frackers, and the forest killers on the front line. The kernel of these groups is made up of First Peoples, those who have been pushed back, or inhabit the frontiers, and are the last guardians of a natural way of life. It's not that they are Noble Savages, but that their ways of life offer them alternatives - however slender - capitalism, and those ways of life, as capitalism expands into the last redoubts, are increasingly threatened.

For the most part, this is the work of a very good journalist. But it is also a kind of diary of an awakening consciousness, of how the 'anti-globalist' writer of 'The Shock Doctrine' came to center her work and her world-vision on climate change. At first, this seems to be yet another story of how having a child changes the way you see the world - a banal, facile bit of handwaving that is rarely particularly convincing. But in her last chapter, she gives an account of the difficulties she had in conceiving a child, and how she came to recognize that she was not alone in this: not only as a woman, but as a living creature. She covered the Deepwater Horizon disaster, shipping out into the oil covered waters, breathing the toxic fumes. At the time she was pregnant, and later had a miscarriage. Although she later learned that this was due to other causes, at first she thought that her unborn baby was another victim of the oil. Then she began to gather tales of women living near contaminated sites, discovering that there were high rates of foetal disturbance, and numerous hysterectomies among relatively young women. She also noted that the big losses among certain animal species affected by such disasters didn't show up immediately, but came online a few years later: it was the young and the unborn who died. Carbon based capitalism is eating the world's children.

Some years later, where are we? Klein seems to still be optimistic (I follow her on Twitter), but the political winds seem to be blowing in the wrong direction. Australia has just given a majority to a coal-loving government. India has handed governance to a fascist for a second five-year term. The US government hides away the facts about global warning. In Europe, fascism is on the rise, and although green parties did well in the recent elections, they are for the most part an uninspiring crew, wedded to some form or other of neoliberalism, and ready to unleash the dogs of war (I recall having an epic argument with some greens at the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan; they were all for it). Warfare is a huge producer of warming pollution. In France and elsewhere, green activists of the kind that Klein prefers are pursued as if they were terrorists. I have trouble sleeping at night.

(This review was made possible by György Ligeti, Aija Puurtinen, Smokey Robinson, Our Native Daughters and Raul Midon)

Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus The Climate" does a marvelous job at distilling the factors that have inhibited action on climate change. Klein's strength as an author is her ability to be able to explain very complex things without a) getting trapped in jargon, b) pursuing faux objectivity, and c) condescending to her audience. Her essential thesis is that our growing awareness of the climate crisis has emerged just as trends in politics and economics (i.e., neo-liberalism, free-market economics, political populism, globalization, industrialization, a worship of technological progress) have developed to make action on this awareness difficult if not impossible. Climate change has the potential to change everything about our societies and resistance to climate change action is precisely for this reason: action fundamentally alters everything that underpins a neoliberal, capitalist economy and political system. Klein also shows that solutions centered around technology (i.e., bio fuels, carbon capture technology, and the horrifying proposals to manipulate the climate through technological innovation) and the benevolence of billionaires will not work. Instead, the solution is going to come from activism from the ground up that will be able to challenge things. I feel that Klein is stronger on the prognosis than the solutions but overall, the book is an essential read in the library of any person thinking about climate change and concerns around the environment.

Great update to Klein's research and thinking on the clash between neoliberalism/globalization and the world. I wish this were a shorter book, it gets its weight from solid story upon scary story rather than strong argument and call to action, but the message is ultimately clear and simple and well-stated for this moment: 1. We have to leave a lot of oil, coal, and gas in the ground starting right now. 2. This will destroy a lot of current wealth and power, as well as the logic of a consumptive/global/growth economy. 3. So those in power, but also the current environmental-focused groups and billionaire technologists, won't save us - the status quo is too bent in their direction. 4. We need direct action, divestment, and embracing the unity of the left's economic demands. This isn't an environmental issue in isolation, and the structural changes and societal support the climate disaster demands share so much in common with global equity, racial equity, and a strong support net that the right is closer to reality in seeing this as a perfect issue for advancing a socialist hell than the left is in hoping for a green tech silver bullet that won't inconvenience the current structures of power.

Naomi Klein's monster of a book took me a while to read. And it was a wild ride of emotions.
I started it before I knew a movie would be made from it. I liked the title and the attitude, but knew very little else about it. I progressed slowly through it, swinging from amazement and joy of learning stuff I didn't even imagine, to depression and fear because, well we seem to be so doomed.
I read quite a few other books simultaneously, just to catch a breath of fiction that would keep me from despair at humanity's bleak future. But I also returned to it to find sparks of light and hope that would make me believe that there is a way out of this hole we have dug ourselves into.
Now the movie has come out, I have watched and enjoed it, although it falls a bit short when compared to the book. (Surprising... haha)
This truly changes everything... we need to rethink and reinvent our roles as inhabitants of this planet. We need to re make the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. We need to return to ancient knowledge and add it to our modern one. We need to rebuild on top of the rubble that this modern capitalism has left us with.
We stand in front of the biggest crisis our species has ever faced. No option is off the table. No certeainty can be left unquestioned.
Of course, the book doesn't provide the answers to all the problems. No one could ever do that. But it points in the right directions, it asks the right questions. I would say it is a necessary book for our society and times.
I know I will return to this book. I don't know when, but I know I've highlighted a large percentage of the book. And it has inspired to look for more information. To make a stand and collaborate in hopes of a better future. It has made me realise that I am not alone in the fear and despair that invades me with the news every day. I am not alone in the hope that we can create a better, fairer reality for all of us. There are more of us everyday and we WILL be heard.
Change is coming. There is no other way, and it is good to know that we can stand together in Blockadia, to rebuild a better world. One with life in the center, instead of profit.

I was hoping for much more from this. I think she starts to make a good case for the incompatibility of neoliberialsm/globalization/short term profits/endless growth/etc with a stable climate system. The overarching (almost religious) belief that somebody will think of a simple technical fix combined with the inability to imagine that our economic and political systems could (or should) be changed in even a minor way has paralyzed our ability to react to this crisis. And really, humans are terrible at assessing long term risks.

From a strong start, it feels like she kind of loses where we can go from here. There is a whole long section on the hope that native land titles can slow down resource extraction, but at the end of the day, a bit of muted protest doesn't seem to have more than a minor impact on the accelerating rate of extraction.

Maybe that seems symptomatic of what was missing from this book. The book is filled with lots of small stories from the front lines (blockade-dia) but as Occupy was successful at raising issues for a brief period, very little has come from it. The world has already committed itself to 1.5-2C of warming, and with current international inaction looking like another decade (or more) of rising emissions likely making that look even higher.

Our inability to respond to this growing crisis by even making small incremental changes to our political/economic systems (let alone completely re-imagine what they will need to be in the future) seems to say that THIS hasn't really changed anything. A increasingly unstable climate (along with species extinctions, pollution, etc) will quite possibly change everything but at this point, there seems to be very little evidence that much of the possible actions in this book have changed much of anything.